Real Estate Investor or Business Owner? Do You Know The Difference?

Are you sitting on a ton of cash and you are not sure what to do with it? Do you need to find a real estate investment to put all that cash into? Are you struggling to find a deal that will give you a good ROI on all that cash you have laying around? Or does this describe you…?

Do you need to find some cash to do your real estate deals? Are you trying to figure out how to get your deals funded? Are you looking for partners to help with the cash to get started or perhaps you are looking for a “no money down” deal to get you going?

If the second description is you then you are not a real estate investor…you are a real estate entrepreneur! You are a real estate business owner, not an investor and there is a BIG difference. An investor is someone that fits the first description. An investor already has a lot of cash and needs to put it into a deal to get a return on all that money they have laying around.

Most people don’t realize that they are real estate entrepreneurs and are not actually real estate investors at all. This is one major mistake that most new real estate entrepreneurs / investors make and it can definitely lead to early failure in the real estate business.

As a real estate entrepreneur or real estate business owner you need to start by treating yourself and thinking like a business and business owner. This means working long hours that don’t necessarily have a paycheck at the end. You need to be creative and innovative in your approach to buying real estate. Here are a few areas to consider.

Know who your competition is and what they are doing to get deals.

You need to know your exit strategy for the deal before you go into it.

Where will you get funding from?

Do you need partners to bring experience, credibility, equity?

How will you find those partners (investors with all that cash I mentioned)

Do you have systems in place for creating deal flow?

Do you have systems in place for exiting the deal profitably? (buyers list)

Do you have any software systems in place to minimize the work load?

Most importantly…do you have someone in your corner looking over your shoulder and giving you solid advice on a regular basis? No matter how good, big, successful, wealthy you are, you always need good council or coaching. I always have coaches and council in my business model no matter what I am doing or working on. I never believe that I know it all, no matter how big my portfolio is.

When you get started in real estate (or if you already are) you need to act as if you are building a business. The product just happens to be real estate but I would suggest that you actually forget that for now. Act as if your product was a new widget that the world has never seen before. How will you tell the world about yourself and business? How will you market and sell this product? How will you get the funds to run the business? Think like a business owner not an investor.

If you can do this and set up this type of business structure then the product is inconsequential and will take care of itself.

Bill Ham has been investing in real estate for 8 years and has created a portfolio of nearly 400 apartment units in Macon, GA. He created his entire real estate investing portfolio using creative and seller financing.